As can be seen by reference to the following U.S. Pat. Nos. 671,855; 972,382; 1,292,766; and 3,860,241; the prior art is replete with myriad and diverse board game apparatus which simulate military battles according to the laws of chance.
While all of the aforementioned prior art constructions are more than adequate for the basic purpose and function for which they have been specifically designed, these board game apparatus are seriously deficient from the standpoint of serious students of military history because there is no similarity at all between a game of chance and a historical event of military significance.
In addition, students of military history have been handicapped in their ability to understand and follow the maneuvers and progress of individual military units during the course of a single battle, campaign, or war because, to date, no one has provided a method and apparatus with which they could use both a historically accurate map and written military history to track and duplicate the historically accurate maneuvers of military units in a given battle.
Serious students of military history find it extremely difficult and at times impossible to track small unit movements, not to mention medium to large unit movements, while reading written accounts of famous battles, even when those written accounts include printed maps that show the overall large scale directions of advance and retreat of the main bodies of the opposing forces, without additional reference materials and aids.
In addition, when they are interrupted while trying to recreate, track, and understand the unit movements involved in a historical battle, these serious students must often backtrack in order to arrive at and progress beyond the point at which they were interrupted.
These students of military history, therefore, need a new method and apparatus for tracking both large and small scale military unit movements on a historically accurate map while reading a written account of a particular battle, and producing such a method and apparatus is a stated objective of the present invention.